The other day I ran a Pig script. Nothing fancy; I loaded some data into HBase and then ran a second Pig job to do some aggregations. I knew the data loading would take some time as it was multiple GB of data, but I expected the second aggregation job to run much faster. It [...]
For the past decades, mainframe experts have been tasked with tuning their systems, applications, databases and individual DB2 SQL executions. Traditional Monitoring and Application Performance Management (APM) tools provide useful insight to support these tasks. APM for the Mainframe is therefore well established and saves more money by optimizing MIPS and MSUs than these performance [...]
The other day I was looking at a web application that was using MongoDB as its central database. We were analyzing the application for potential performance problems and inside 5 minutes I detected what I must consider to be a MongoDB anti pattern and had a 40% impact on response time. The funny thing: It [...]
A couple of weeks ago we helped a customer get more visibility into his production environment with Compuware dynaTrace. He was already using it in other environments, so he knew what he was getting. Anyway, a couple of hours later I read a tweet from him: “Just hooked up dynaTrace. Can’t wait for tomorrows traffic [...]
Even though HTML5, JavaScript and CSS are great technologies for building Rich Client Applications that run in the browser – many people continue to use “real” Rich Client Browser Technologies such as Flash and Silverlight as it provides greater flexibility in certain scenarios. From a User Experience Management (UEM) or Real User Monitoring (RUM) perspective [...]
Online shopping during the 2012 holiday seasons is on target to be the busiest in history. Business is expected to be up 450% more than on an average day, while online retailers could see a 200% gain. Black Friday is expected to be the second-biggest online retail day this year, with sales growing 12% from [...]
Swarovski – the leading producer of cut crystal in the world- relies on its eCommerce store as much like other companies in the highly competitive eCommerce environment. Swarovski’s story is no different from others in this space: They started with “Let’s build a website to sell our products online” a couple of years ago and [...]
Does your application architecture include Message Queues to feed work items to backend batch processing such as “Update Product Inventory” or “Send out Notification Emails”? Message Queues work well in these use cases as they decouple your system components and allow your backend processing to asynchronously process requests. This decoupling allows the queue to grow [...]
An eCommerce site that crashes 7 times during the Christmas season, being down for up to five hours each time it crashes is a site that loses a lot of money and suffers reputation damage. It happened to one of our customers, before we started working with them. They shared their story and what they [...]
Does the following situation sound familiar? From one minute to the other, your production servers grind to a halt, terse emails are complemented by equally hectic phone calls, and the first order of business is to get back up and running. After the dust settles, you’re usually left with a pile of log files and [...]
